The Everyday Life of an Algorithm
This open access book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF…THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm’s design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.This open access book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF…THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm’s design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.
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Description of The Everyday Life of an Algorithm
This open access book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF…THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the a
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Publish Date
2019 Jun 23
ISBN
978-3-030-00578-8
About the authors
Department of Sociology,Goldsmiths, University of London,London,UK Research My research interests cover issues of governance, accountability and ethics in forms of science, technology and organization. I draw on ideas from ethnomethodology, science and technology studies (in particular forms of radical and reflexive scepticism, constructivism, Actor-Network Theory and the recent STS turn to markets and other forms of organizing) and my research is ethnographic in orientation. In particular I am interested in the question of how entities (objects, values, relationships, processes and also people) become of the world. My substantive interests are quite varied. Across a number of research projects I have ethnographically engaged with: security and surveillance, traffic management, waste, airports, biometrics, parking, signposts, malaria vaccines, Universities, algorithms and speeding drivers. Through these projects I have looked into ontology, notions of equivalence, parasitism, the mundane, market failures, problems and solutions, deleting, value and the utility of social science.
Daniel Neyland
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